Tag: XAML

Using Styles to create a consistent User Interface is generally considered to be a best practice. In much the same way as CSS is used on the Web, Styles in XAML provide a similar development experience.

Outcome

By the end of this post we will have implemented a Style to target our About and Settings Buttons on the Home Page. removing some of the duplication in the XAML definitions.

Applications generally have a settings page, or similar allowing the user to configure the application. We laid the groundwork for making the Translation Direction setting configurable in the previous post, let’s look at putting that in to practice.

One of the most compelling reasons to download an app is the number of Universal App Reviews in the store. This tutorial will look at adding a Review App Button to our completely empty About Page. There are various places you can surface the Review App Function, commonly it’ll be available on an About or Info page, or you may choose to have a Review Reminder. As with a number of things with UWP apps, the Universal App Review Method changed slightly from Windows Phone 8’s MarketPlaceTask, let’s take a look…

One of the rules of using MVVM is that your model shouldn’t need to know anything about the UI Layer, and your View should be decoupled from the Model via the ViewModel. It can often be necessary to have some form of conversion between what our Model understands and what the View would understand. A common example would be converting a boolean flag to a Visibility State, this is where Value Converters come in.

Outcome

We’ll follow a slightly more domain specific example in this case, converting the TranslationDirection Enumeration Property to a Visibility State for our Morse Input User Control.

Despite the rise in popularity of Single Page Applications (SPAs) and supporting frameworks like Angular in the Web Development world, it might be nice if we had more than one page in our app, or at least had the option to. Our app so far is contained within a single page, MainPage.xaml. A common pattern is to have different pages for Settings or Publisher contact information. Navigation has moved on since Windows Phone 7.5 when it was URI based, we will look at how it now works with Universal Apps with typing and the MVVM Light implementation of INavigationService. Continue reading “Universal App Tutorials Part 10 : MVVM Light NavigationService”

Intro

This UI is less than usable! There are a new set of User Controls made available as part of Windows 10, for example the Relative Panel. In this post we’ll look at ways we can make our UI adaptive based on the screen size we are targeting.

Outcome

By the end of this post we will have a single app that is usable on PCs, tablets, and Phones. We’ll be looking into Visual State Triggers in order to alter the size of the text presented in our Input and Output TextBox and TextBlock controls. Visual State Triggers apply transformations to the base XAML defined, we’ll be using this method to make our app responsive.

User controls offer a way to abstract common areas of your User Interface in a reusable package, allowing you to simplify your views and push some of the complexity of your UI into more manageable pieces. This tutorial will focus on Data Binding to Properties on a User Control from a ViewModel.

Outcome

By the end of this post we should have a basic User Control bound against some Commands living in the MainViewModel to manipulate the content of the Input, in our case, we’ll offer a way to input Morse Code (dots/dashes) outside of needing to use a Keyboard in preparation for extending the App to translate both ways from the User Interface.Continue reading “Morse Coder Part 7 : Data Binding User Controls”